1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print technology in a printing system including a printer and a print server available on a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are broadly two methods for using a networked printer for printing from information processing apparatuses such as a personal computer (PC) and a personal digital assistance (PDA). One is installing a printer driver and activating an application on an information processing apparatus for printing. The other one is such that an information processing apparatus requests printing from a networked printing service that performs printing.
The former method allows the information processing apparatus to use a networked printer for printing if the printer driver is installed and the printer Internet Protocol (IP) address is allocated to a Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) port of the printer. The latter method can perform printing by using a print application for printing documents which are targets of the printing service on the network. A print application having the function equivalent to the printer driver is used for printing.
Printer drivers include a model-specific driver and a basic printer driver. The model-specific driver covers features specific to printer models. The basic printer driver covers only general printer functions such as specifying the number of copies. The model-specific driver provides special printer functions by connecting to corresponding models or enabling options for image processing, high-precision rendering, and print job concatenation.
A personal computer (PC) requires higher capabilities of a central processing unit (CPU) and memory to execute the model-specific driver than the basic printer driver. However, the model-specific driver can provide functions (user interfaces in particular) of effectively using printers and is therefore widely used for commercial products.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-63415 discusses a technique for providing users with a user interface for printing. According to Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-63415, the printer driver displays a print setting screen by referring to a web page provided from the network printer.
Accordingly, a similar setting screen can be provided regardless of a type of operating system (OS) on which the printer driver operates. The model-specific driver may be installed to disable reference to the web page provided from the network printer. In such a case, the model-specific driver provides an ordinary setting screen.
However, the above-mentioned printing system does not take an environment into consideration. For example, only the basic printer driver can operate due to restrictions on the memory or the central processing unit (CPU) of the information processing apparatus or due to the security of inhibiting installation of the model-specific driver. A technique that allows users to easily use convenient functions specific to printer types under the environment where only the basic printer driver can operate, is desired.